Spicebush grows wild on this farm, as it once did on every farm in every township in every county between the Ohio River and Lake Erie.
The spicebush was here when the Moundbuilders came, and The Spicebush was here when they left. The Spicebush was here when the Delaware hunted and the Shawnee built their village atop the glacial Moraine overlooking the Little Miami River. The Spicebush was here when white folks came up that river and burned the Shawnee villages and cleared the hunting grounds and built their bank barns and grazed their cattle.
The Spicebush is here. The only thing stopping the world from having it, are adequate numbers of men willing to go get it.
I was four years into an international logistics career when COVID started. I was running an airfreight crossdocking operation for a major freight forwarder in Columbus, exporting everything under the sun to every corner of the earth.
The commute ate 150 miles and three hours a day. My wife and young son were strangers to me. I had abandoned them to chase money.
We cleared the office in March 2020.
I, like every other able-bodied working person in America, was faced with a juncture in life. We could have chosen comfort in pursuit of stability. Or uncertainty in pursuit of legacy.
I will not type for a living. I will not spend the best years of my life staring at a computer screen, moving other people's freight through other people’s supply chains.
I will not raise my children to believe that a life’s work happens in a chair.
I will to sleep with dirt under my fingernails. I will build supply chains that don't yet exist, for a product that nobody knows they want. I will plant a crop no one else has tried growing. I will build a brand nobody else can build.
I have a ten-year plan. I intend to build something that lives beyond my lifetime. I will either achieve this goal, or I will go broke.
There is no third option.